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Monthly Archives: June 2018

Piles of rocks like this one mark the pathways I follow on my long daily uphill trudges deep into the forested mountains near my home here in Germany. Today, I felt to stop at this one. I spotted a small angular stone at my feet and placed it without ceremony on the very top of the heap. Then, tugging my red neoprene jacket closed across my chest, I sat down cross-legged in my gray jogging tights right there on the bed of pine needles and gravel.

Under a shroud of birdsong, the following lyrics came to my mind:

“Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither to thy help I’ve come
And I hope, by thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home…”

That verse from the hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is one I recall mumbling through when I was younger because, honestly, I wasn’t sure why we were singing about Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in an otherwise lovely anthem to Christ. The word “ebenezer,” I’ve since learned, means “stone of help” (stone=eben; help=ezer), and holds a key to our spiritual steadiness. It might also unlock greater understanding of who we women are and what we are doing with our gifts, resources, time, lives.

“Ebenezer”, or stone of help, appears twenty-four times in the Old Testament. In 1 Samuel 7:12, for instance, after intervening in and winning Israel’s battles for them, God commands his followers to raise stones and stack them, therewith constructing a lasting memorial commemorating the miracle he has wrought in their lives. In Samuel we read:

“Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Eben-ezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.”

And in Joshua 4:21-23, after the Israelites cross the Jordan whose river bed has been miraculously rendered dry by God’s hand, God again commands his people to raise or stack stones as a lasting monument to the wonder they have witnessed.

“And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.”

With a simple stack of stones not only would the eyewitnesses of God’s help be reminded of what they knew of God’s power, but generations yet to come would be reminded of what God had done for their fathers and, in turn, could do in their lives.

Of course, God didn’t need these monuments. Man did. God knew man’s nature then as he does now. He knew that once our crisis passes and our adrenalin levels have normalized; once our howling prayers of fear or desperation have faded to a whimper, then a drone, then to vain repetitions; once we’ve stepped on safe dry ground and slid back into daily distractions; once we don’t need him quite as acutely as we maybe once did, we quickly, tragically and cyclically forget him. Without deliberate mortal markers that cause us to remember him, we will forget.

Poor creatures! We all seem destined to die of spiritual Alzheimers.

Against such disease, God commands us to do the unlikely: grab some rocks. Stack stones. The point here, significantly, is not that men, as slaves, build some monument of vanity to God. Nor is the point for man to construct a Tower of Babel to physically ascend to God. The object of the stones is simply to take the time to remember. It’s not complicated or sophisticated work. Anyone can do it. But raising rocks of remembrance will do our eternal spirits the ultimate good. Simply remembering God and connections with him will invite him into our very immediate and intimate midst. We will meet and be one with him exactly where and when we remember him. This is the sublime and simple promise we hear weekly in the sacraments prayers: If we will but remember him, we will have God with us.

What might this all mean for women specifically?

While “ebenezer” is used twenty-four times in the Old Testament, (out of which sixteen times it refers to God as our ultimate and divine “helper”), it is only used twice to refer to Eve. When God presents Adam with an “ezer k’negdo”, God gives man not a “helpmate”, as the word has traditionally been mistranslated. Rather, God is blessing Adam with a mighty help — a help meet or equal to Adam’s needs. Eve is given to man and the sons of Adam as a protector against mankind’s enemy. Woman is a formidable partner who comforts, strengthens, and helps win humanity’s most fierce battles. She saves.

We women are all Eves. Women are charged with the holy mission to identify the enemy of mankind in all its forms and lead out in this tired world’s battle. For my work with Their Story is Our Story (or TSOS Refugees, a grassroots NGO where I am a founding member), I am fighting to give voice to my oppressed, persecuted, and voiceless refuge sisters and brothers the world over. And at Mormon Women for Ethical Government, (a non-partisan, peacemaking political activism NGO for which I am also a founding member), we aim to harness our covenant power, wrapping it up in our natural sisterly unity in order to identify, confront, and defeat darkness within government.

But as with anything that has great potential for power, there will be opposition. The danger, as I have observed it in myself, that threatens our effectiveness is if we rely on ourselves or any other faulty source of guidance and forget God. If we rush into our days, not with soothing scripture but with scathing news headlines blazing in our minds. If we, in all our passion for what is good and light, drive ourselves into the ground, cynical and depleted and empty in the end. If we catch ourselves feeling mostly frantic or furious, overextended or overburdened, exhausted or even excessively excitable. If we “feel dark clouds of trouble hang o’r us” which “threaten our peace to destroy”, then we must stop.

We must find a stone.

We must bow our heads.

We must remember him.

We must remind ourselves that in this battle — like all the others since before the world’s foundation — he has been our Savior:

“We doubt not the Lord nor his goodness/
We have proved him in days that are past.”

So sisters, raise your ebenezer! Stack stone upon stone upon stone. Take slow, systematic inventory of your intimate history with God. Reflect on him and his unspeakable love until your entire body feels refreshed, renewed. Write down that witness you have until tears mix with ink. Read it out loud until your throat constricts with gratitude and awe. Share that belief with someone, without shame or exaggeration. Remember stone by stone by stone what he already has wrought in your life and then witness to someone else that he will do just the same in theirs.

Here is just the start of my stack:

I remember when peace extinguished bone-crushing anguish
I remember inexplicable moments of epiphany
I remember a burning prayer answered in the cool of the night
I remember impossible insights via the spirit
I remember dreams that warned and instructed
I remember dreams that were more visitation
I remember his voice and his hands on my troubled head
I remember a-ha! revelations and slow-melt awakenings
I remember pounding my fists on the tiled kitchen floor. And his patience.
I remember holes and hunger filled
I remember the right person saying the right thing at the right moment
I remember when I knew. I simply knew.
I remember he has always, unfailingly remembered me.

(A version of this piece was published on June 24th, 2018 as one of the weekly Sabbath Devotionals for the members of MWEG, or Mormon Women for Ethical Government.)